My research and teaching focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, with specialisms in the history of science, migration, and urban history. I am especially interested in the mobility of ideas and people; in particular how (and where) knowledge is produced, communicated, and transformed by people in motion across various cultural, social, and political contexts - and how knowledge shapes those contexts. I explore these questions in and beyond the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, and between East Central Europe and the West, particularly Britain, in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
I was born in state socialist Hungary and I’m lucky to have been young enough not to remember much of it. I studied English, American Studies, and Education at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and subsequently worked as an English teacher for a few years. I went on to study History at MA and PhD level at the Central European University, an international, US-accredited graduate university then based in Budapest (and now in Vienna). During this time, I held a number of international fellowships, including a Marie Curie European Doctorate Fellowship at University College London and a Faculty Fellowship at the History of Science Department at Harvard University.
Following my PhD, I held research and teaching positions at the Institute of European History in Mainz and CEU in Budapest, and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. I moved to the UK in 2017 to take up a Lectureship in Modern European History at the University of Southampton, which was followed by teaching positions at History Departments at the University of Manchester, the University of York, and University College London. I now split my time between Newcastle and York: I have been Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History at Newcastle University since 2024, and I joined York St John University as Lecturer in Liberal Arts in 2025.
At York St John, I teach across the multidisciplinary programme of the Liberal Arts Foundation Year. In 2025-2026, I teach on the following modules:
- LIB3001M: York in Flux
- LIB3007M: Identity and Otherness: The Self and Society (module lead)
- LIB3008M: Truth and Invention: Culture, Myth and Representation
- LIB3006M: Independent Project (Module Lead)
- LIB3004M: Freedom and Justice
- LIB3005M: Imagining the Future: Environment, Apocalypse and the Digital Revolution
As Lecturer in 20th-Century at Newcastle University, I also teach on the following modules in 2025-2026:
- HIS2300 1968: A Global Moment?
- HIS2317 The Aftermath of War in Europe and Asia (also module convenor)
- HIS3020 Writing History
- HIS3369 Insiders and Outsiders: Migrants, Refugees, and the Making of Modern Europe (module convenor)
- HIS8053 Conflict in European History (MA)
- HIS8069 The Practice of History (MA)
In previous roles, I have also taught modules on the history of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, the cultural history of war and the Cold War, urban history and culture, the history of science and medicine, and the history of climate change and capitalism, as well as modern English language and literature.
My research interests include knowledge production and science communication in the long nineteenth century, in particular the translation and reception of Darwinism and evolutionary ideas in Central Europe; the role of the city and urban culture in the circulation and transformations of knowledge; migration and exile; and the history of Hungary and the Habsburg Empire in a global and transnational context.
I am currently working on two projects: both aim to understand the way mobility and cultural encounter matter in writing transnational histories of knowledge. In a cultural history of Darwinism in Habsburg Hungary, through a closer reading of the translation and reception of Darwin's and his contemporaries' work, I explore how translation became part of a patriotic agenda - at the same time when publishing, reading, and discussing Darwin and other Western scientific literature also became a form of bourgeois sociability in the Habsburg Empire. More broadly, this work explores the role of local knowledge and empire in knowledge production.
My other project is a history of migration from East Central Europe to Britain since the early 19th century, exploring how the transformation of knowledge, stereotypes, and public debates about migrants, exiles, and refugees, as well as more personal experiences of immigration have shaped Britain's ideas of and relationship with Europe.
I have been awarded research funding from, among others, the European Commission, the British Society for the History of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. I am particularly grateful for the generosity of George Soros, for founding and providing the endowment for the Central European University, where I received a full doctoral fellowship, support for archival research and study abroad, a dissertation write-up grant, and became a historian.
Recent publications
I have been Council Member of the British Society for the History of Science since 2023, and have been on the selection committee for the BSHS Pickstone Prize, which is awarded every two years to the best scholarly book in the history of science (broadly construed) in English, twice, in 2024 and 2026. Between 2016 and 2024 I was an elected member of the International Committee of the European Association of European History and was Reviews Editor of the journal Jewish Culture and History from 2019 to 2023.
I have been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2023.
